Startup Deep Dive : BatX Energies — how a six-month battery delay turned into a Rs 105 crore bet

Utkarsh Singh and Vikrant Singh’s college racing team lost its shot at the Baja SAE India competition in 2017 because a single lithium-ion battery, ordered from an overseas supplier, took six months to arrive. The delay convinced the two BML Munjal University engineering students that India had no real domestic answer for the raw materials locked inside a battery pack. Out of that frustration grew BatX Energies, a Gurugram-based recycler that says it has now processed 220 million batteries and, in July 2026, closed a ₹105 crore ($11 million, at $1 ≈ ₹96.0) Series A round led by IvyCap Ventures.

Yet the same public record that shows that funding also shows a business still finding its financial footing: BatX Energies booked ₹23.53 crore (about $2.45 million) in revenue for the year ended 31 March 2024, a figure smaller than several of the individual funding rounds that came before and after it, according to filings compiled by corporate-data platform TheCompanyCheck. That gap — between a scaling growth story and a still-thin topline — runs through nearly every chapter of the company’s six years, from a pandemic-era founding to a hazardous-waste reclassification that could remake its core supply chain overnight.

Quick facts

What they do

BatX Energies collects lithium-ion batteries that have reached the end of their working life — from electric vehicles, consumer electronics, telecom towers and battery-manufacturing rejects — and breaks them down to recover the metals inside: lithium, cobalt, nickel, manganese and graphite. It sells three things from that process, according to a YourStory account of the business (14 August 2024): black mass (the mixed-metal powder produced when a battery is shredded), refined metals extracted from that black mass, and secondary by-products such as high-grade plastic and aluminium sold on to other recyclers. Buyers include electric-vehicle makers, telecom operators and companies in pharmaceuticals, electroplating and fertilisers that use the recovered metals as industrial inputs. Batteries that still hold usable charge are instead repurposed into second-life products such as solar EV chargers and inverters rather than being shredded.

The origin

Singh and Singh were engineering students at BML Munjal University in Haryana when they signed up to build an electric car for the Baja SAE India student racing competition in 2017 — the year the organisers stopped allowing petrol-engine entries. Sourcing a lithium-ion battery domestically proved impossible, so the team turned to a vendor who imported one from Korea. “For six months they kept delaying the delivery of this battery, and eventually, we couldn’t participate in the competition,” Utkarsh Singh later told The Better India (1 March 2024). “Frustrated by this outcome, Vikrant and I began discussing why these Li-ion batteries aren’t being made in India.” The answer, they found, was that the raw materials — lithium, cobalt and nickel — were not mined or processed domestically either, so even a locally assembled cell would still depend on imports. That single realisation, rather than any grand cleantech thesis, is the seed BatX Energies grew from.

The struggle years

The first idea the pair chased was not recycling at all. After college, they tried building an indigenous lithium-ion battery cell to remove India’s dependence on imported packs, according to The Better India’s account of the founding story. It did not solve the underlying problem: even a cell built in India still needed lithium, cobalt and nickel sourced from abroad. Realising that recycling old batteries for those same metals was both a bigger and a more solvable opportunity than manufacturing new cells, the two pivoted, and incorporated BatX Energies on 7 July 2020 — in the middle of India’s pandemic lockdowns, with capital markets closed to most first-time hardware founders. Early funding reflected that caution: BatX raised just $1.96 million in total across two separate rounds in 2021 and 2022, according to a 20 December 2023 report on trade publication EVreporter. The company’s first Black Mass production line came up in the Sikandrabad industrial area near Bulandshahr, Uttar Pradesh, in late 2022, and was then run through a 21-month industrial pilot starting mid-2023 before the business felt ready to build a full commercial critical-minerals plant — a long, unglamorous stretch of process engineering rather than a single dramatic setback, but one that kept the company pre-revenue at any meaningful scale for nearly four years after incorporation.

The turning point

Two events, eleven months apart, mark the shift from pilot-scale recycler to a company with anchor customers and growth capital. In July 2025, Vietnamese automaker VinFast signed BatX to handle high-voltage battery recycling, material recovery and repurposing for its Indian factory and after-sales network, as VinFast prepared to scale annual EV production in India to as much as 150,000 units and begin exporting to the Middle East and Africa, Inc42 reported (11 July 2025) — at the time, BatX was targeting a $20 million Series A within six months. That round eventually closed a year later, in July 2026, at ₹105 crore ($11 million) led by IvyCap Ventures, with existing backers Zephyr Peacock, Mankind Pharma Family Office, Excel Industries Family Office and JITO returning, per EVreporter (2 July 2026). The contrast is stark: before, a company running a single Uttar Pradesh hub on roughly $7 million of lifetime funding; after, one with four granted patents, a battery-shredding and hydrometallurgy capacity of 5,000 tonnes a year each, a micro-facility collection network with combined capacity above 20,000 tonnes a year, and a co-founder telling reporters BatX was “positioned to scale what we have successfully built in India to global markets.”

The money behind it

• 2021-22 (seed): $1.96 million raised across two undisclosed rounds — EVreporter, 20 December 2023.
• December 2023 (pre-Series A): $5 million led by Zephyr Peacock, with LetsVenture, JITO Angel Network and the family offices of Mankind Pharma, Excel Industries and BluSmart — EVreporter and Business Standard, December 2023. Funds were earmarked for scaling Hy-electro-based extraction, pCAM (precursor Cathode Active Material) R&D, a second-life energy-storage line, and new micro-facilities.
• July 2026 (Series A): ₹105 crore (about $11 million) led by IvyCap Ventures, with Zephyr Peacock, Mankind Pharma Family Office, Excel Industries Family Office and JITO all returning — EVreporter and Entrackr, 2 July 2026. Earmarked for recycling and refining capacity, R&D, and a domestic critical-minerals supply chain.
• Total raised to date: roughly $18 million across the three disclosed rounds since 2021 — company disclosures aggregated by EVreporter and Entrackr; no post-money valuation has been made public for any round.
• Key backers and what they added: Zephyr Peacock has stayed in every round since 2023 and holds board-observer rights through managing director Pankaj Raina; IvyCap Ventures, a Mumbai venture firm managing over $650 million (about ₹6,000 crore) in assets, led the Series A and brought founder Vikram Gupta onto the cap table — IvyCap’s own statement, via EVreporter, 2 July 2026.

How it makes money

BatX buys spent batteries, pays more for packs with more residual charge left in them, then runs them through an in-house “zero-waste, zero-emission” hydro-electro process to separate the casing, plastics and metals. According to Utkarsh Singh’s account to YourStory, the company’s edge is yield and purity rather than price: it says it recovers about 95% of the lithium and nickel in a battery, against 85-87% for rivals, and produces black mass with less than 1% impurities. A separate report on the company’s earlier funding round cites 99.95%-pure lithium, nickel and cobalt extracted from that black mass (Entrackr, 20 December 2023). Margin sits in that gap between input cost and output purity: because BatX has built its own machinery rather than importing plant, and does not outsource any stage of the chemistry, it captures value at each step — shredding, black mass, refined metal — instead of splitting it with a processor further down the chain.

• Revenue lines: black mass sales; refined metals (lithium, cobalt, nickel, manganese); secondary by-products (plastics, aluminium) sold to other recyclers; second-life battery products (solar EV chargers, inverters) — YourStory, August 2024.
• Sourcing pattern: about 80% of the lithium recovered from consumer-electronics batteries comes via the unorganised scrap sector, while roughly 80% of EV-battery feedstock comes via the organised sector — Zephyr Peacock’s Om Pawaskar, quoted in YourStory, August 2024.
• What people get wrong: the business is not scrap trading. It is a chemistry and process-engineering operation — margin depends on extraction yield and metal purity, not on buying batteries cheap and reselling them whole.

The numbers

BatX Energies is privately held, and only one year of audited revenue is visible in the free layer of its Ministry of Corporate Affairs filings. Profit or loss for any year was locked behind a paid report at every data provider checked for this piece, so it is left out rather than estimated.

• FY24 revenue: ₹23.53 crore, up 7.42% year-on-year — TheCompanyCheck, citing MCA filings, data as of 15 January 2026.
• FY23 revenue (derived): approximately ₹21.9 crore, back-calculated from the FY24 figure and its stated growth rate; not an independently filed number.
• Five-year target: Utkarsh Singh told YourStory (14 August 2024) that scaling metal-extraction capacity over the following five years was expected to produce “a top line of around Rs 110 crore” — a company projection, not an audited result.
• Balance-sheet debt: ₹30.05 crore in open secured charges (₹7 crore from SIDBI, ₹23.05 crore from other lenders) against ₹20 crore already satisfied, per MCA charge filings compiled by TheCompanyCheck, the latest dated 17 October 2025.
• Headcount: about 42 employees as of mid-January 2026 per EPFO records cited by TheCompanyCheck, down from a 48-person team YourStory reported in August 2024.

Where the money comes from

BatX’s feedstock and its customer base both run wider than a single-city Indian recycler’s usually do.

• Product mix: black mass, refined metals and secondary by-products (plastic, aluminium) formed the three disclosed revenue lines as of August 2024 — YourStory.
• Customer segments: electric-vehicle makers (VinFast from July 2025; MG Motor named as a customer in earlier coverage), telecom-tower operators, and buyers in pharmaceuticals, electroplating and fertilisers who use recovered metals as industrial inputs — YourStory and Inc42.
• Feedstock geography — the surprise: alongside domestic collection, BatX has built sourcing networks in Malaysia, the United Kingdom, Germany and the Philippines to import used batteries into India for processing — the reverse of the import-dependence story that founded the company — YourStory, August 2024.
• Processing footprint: a Black Mass unit and, from December 2024, a Critical Minerals Extraction plant (“HUB-1”) in Uttar Pradesh, plus a hub-and-spoke network of smaller collection facilities that the company said (March 2024) it planned to extend to Hosur, Siliguri and Gujarat, and (August 2024) to Tamil Nadu and Karnataka — The Better India and YourStory.

The risks

• Regulatory whiplash on its core input: black mass, BatX’s primary raw material, is classified as hazardous waste under HS code 8549 and needs Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change clearance plus a Directorate General of Foreign Trade licence to move at all. Enforcement is still unsettled — EVreporter reported on 31 October 2025 that at least four Indian recyclers were allegedly trying to export roughly 250 tonnes of black mass by mislabelling it as non-hazardous cargo, and a separate EVreporter report (8 November 2025) described the government tightening those export curbs further. A shift in how this material can be classified, taxed or moved could change BatX’s economics with little warning.
• A feedstock pool still outside the formal system: Zephyr Peacock’s Om Pawaskar told YourStory (August 2024) that roughly 80% of consumer-electronics battery scrap moves through India’s unorganised sector, and that today’s spent-battery volumes reflect device sales from three years earlier. BatX’s growth plan depends on that scrap increasingly flowing to organised recyclers rather than informal ones — a market shift it does not control.
• Debt-funded capacity ahead of revenue: BatX carried ₹30.05 crore of open secured charges against FY24 revenue of ₹23.53 crore, per MCA filings compiled by TheCompanyCheck (data to 17 October 2025). Expanding shredding and hydrometallurgy capacity from 5,000 tonnes a year each toward the more-than-20,000-tonne network capacity management has described will likely need further debt or equity before revenue catches up.

The takeaway

BatX Energies was not founded to fight climate change in the abstract; it was founded because two students could not get hold of a battery in time for a race. That is arguably the most useful thing about the company’s story: the six-month wait for an imported cell taught its founders more about India’s real supply-chain gap than any market report could have, and the business they built to close that one gap for themselves ended up being a more durable idea than the racing car ever was. The broader lesson travels well beyond battery recycling — the businesses worth building are often hiding inside a founder’s own unsolved logistics problem, not in a slide deck about a trillion-dollar market.

Frequently asked questions

What does BatX Energies actually do?

It recycles end-of-life lithium-ion batteries and battery-manufacturing scrap to recover lithium, cobalt, nickel, manganese and graphite, which it sells as black mass, refined metals and eventually Cathode Active Material to battery makers and industrial buyers, while repurposing still-usable cells into second-life products.

Who founded BatX Energies and when?

Utkarsh Singh and Vikrant Singh, engineering students at BML Munjal University, incorporated the company on 7 July 2020 in Gurugram, after an idea that began with a delayed battery import for a 2017 college racing project.

How much funding has BatX Energies raised?

Roughly $18 million across three disclosed rounds: $1.96 million over two rounds in 2021-22, $5 million in a December 2023 pre-Series A led by Zephyr Peacock, and ₹105 crore (about $11 million) in a July 2026 Series A led by IvyCap Ventures. No valuation has been publicly disclosed for any round.

Is BatX Energies profitable?

That is not publicly known. Its FY24 revenue was ₹23.53 crore, up 7.42% year-on-year per MCA filings compiled by TheCompanyCheck, but profit-or-loss figures were not visible in the public filings accessed for this piece.

Who are BatX Energies’ main competitors?

India’s lithium-ion battery recycling market also includes larger, longer-established players such as Lohum Cleantech (founded 2018) and Attero Recycling (founded 2007), both of which have signed deals with automakers for battery recycling and material recovery.

Sources

Figures are as of September 2026. Currency converted at $1 ≈ ₹96.0 as of 18 September 2026 (Trading Economics).

• EVreporter, “BatX Energies raises $5 Million in Pre-Series A round led by Zephyr Peacock,” 20 December 2023
• Business Standard, “Battery recycling startup BatX Energies raises $5 mn in early stage funding,” December 2023
• The Better India, “Why A Startup is Recycling 220 Million Li-ion Batteries For EV Makers, Solar Chargers & More,” 1 March 2024
• YourStory, “BatX is contributing to a circular economy by unbundling used lithium-ion batteries,” 14 August 2024
• EVreporter / pv magazine India / Autocar Professional, coverage of the BatX Energies Critical Minerals Extraction plant (HUB-1) launch, Uttar Pradesh, 31 December 2024
• Inc42, “VinFast Partners BatX Energies For Battery Recycling & Critical Mineral Recovery,” 11 July 2025
• EVreporter, “Indian lithium-ion battery recyclers are allegedly dodging the black-mass export ban again,” 31 October 2025
• EVreporter, “Government tightens lithium-ion battery black mass export curbs,” 8 November 2025
• EVreporter, “BatX Energies raises ₹105 crore in Series A funding,” 2 July 2026
• Entrackr, “BatX Energies raises Rs 105 Cr in Series A round led by IvyCap Ventures,” 2 July 2026
• Inc42, “Battery Tech Startup BatX Energies Nets ₹105 Cr To Bolster R&D,” 2 July 2026
• TheCompanyCheck, company filing summary for Batx Energies Private Limited (CIN U31909HR2020PTC087281), data updated 15 January 2026
• Instafinancials, company master data for Batx Energies Private Limited, accessed September 2026

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